Buscador

sábado, 12 de julio de 2014

… For after
all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of
retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this
scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously,
outside our will or our interests. We won’t understand a thing about human life
if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is
what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.

[…]

I imagine
the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they
spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same
experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s when the
misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them
retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their
recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of
quantity they’re not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is
remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation
that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more
painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other. When
Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago
adventure; Josef remembered nothing.

From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting
inequality.